Combining classical comprehensive with ethological based, high-throughput automated behavioral phenotyping for rodent models of stroke

Abstract

Comprehensive behavioral phenotyping of rodents is a process of specifying neurobehavioral characteristics during their ontogeny. In medical translational research, it is a crucial step to defi ne a disease model’s value for predictive experimental preclinical therapy and to detect relevant behavioral outcomes of such therapeutic intervention as endpoints. Over the past 20-30 years, rather standardized approaches evolved using combinations of classical assays spanning all different behavioral domains, as described in the preceding chapters. Specifi c guidelines for the appropriate conduction of such classical phenotyping work have been proposed and will be outlined in this chapter. However, more recently, due to the consideration of certain limitations of classical approaches (non-ethological based, stress-confounded, non-repeatable under the same test construct), intra-home-cage automated phenotyping technologies have been developed, partly validated, and are now available to be integrated into comprehensive phenotyping approaches at a larger scale. A technical description of different automated systems as well as information on application fi elds and data mining will be given in this chapter. Besides, the capabilities of such technologies regarding their integration into comprehensive screens of rodent models of stroke will be discussed.